Pay-per-Use Billing

Application Scenarios

Pay-per-use billing is suitable for applications or services that cannot be interrupted but have unpredictable or sudden traffic surges, such as flash sale activities on e-commerce platforms, temporary testing, and scientific computing.

Billing Items

The following billing items support pay-per-use billing.

If you plan to purchase the professional edition SA with one ECS quota, and select the pay-per-use billing mode, at the bottom of the SA purchase page, you can view the fee details, as shown in the following figure.

Figure 1 Example price

The price includes:

• Professional: the fees for the professional edition and the ECS quota.

Billing Period

Pay-per-use SA resources are billed by second. Bills are settled on each integer hour (UTC+08:00). After the settlement is complete, a new billing period starts. The billing starts from the time when SA is purchased, and ends at the time when pay-per-use billing is disabled.

For example, if you purchase a pay-per-use SA edition at 8:45:30, and delete it at 8:55:00, the billing period is from 8:00:00 to 9:00:00. Fees are generated for the duration from 8:45:30 to 8:55:30, and the billing duration is 600 seconds.

Billing Examples

Assume that you purchased the pay-per-use professional edition SA (ECS quota: 1) at 09:59:30 on June 8, 2023. Then, you delete them at 10:45:46 on June 8, 2023. The billing periods of the service edition, ECS quota, and large screen are as follows:

• The first billing period is from 9:00:00 to 10:00:00. Fees are generated from 9:59:30 to 10:00:00. The billing duration is 30 seconds within the period.
• The second billing period is from 10:00:00 to 11:00:00. Fees are generated from 10:00:00 to 10:45:46. The billing duration is 2,746 seconds within the period.

You need to pay for each billing period, and SecMaster resources are billed individually. The billing formula is shown in Table 2. The price of a resource listed in the product pricing details is per hour, so divide it by 3600 to obtain the price for each second.

Figure 2 shows the billing calculation.

The prices shown in the figure are for reference only. The final price is determined by the specific order. For details, see SA Pricing Details.

Figure 2 Pricing example of pay-per-use SA

Impact on Billing After Specification Change

If you change the ECS quota after the purchase, a new order will be generated based on the new price. The old order automatically becomes invalid.

If you change the ECS quota within one hour after the purchase, multiple billing records will be generated. The start time and end time of each billing record correspond to when different configurations comes to effect within the hour.

For example, if you purchase the professional edition SA with one ECS quota at 09:00:00 and increase the ECS quota to 2 at 09:30:00, two billing records are generated between 9:00:00 and 10:00:00.

• The first billing record is for the professional edition and the ECS quota of one for the duration from 09:00:00 to 09:30:00.
• The second billing record is for the professional edition and the ECS quota of 2 for the duration from 09:30:00 to 10:00:00.

Impact of Arrears

Figure 3 describes the status of pay-per-use SA resources in different periods. After you purchase SA resources, the period during which the resources run properly within the billing cycle is the validity period. If your account is in arrears due to failed payments for the pay-per-use SA resources, the resources enter the grace period and then retention period.

Figure 3 SA resource lifecycle

Arrears notifications

The system deducts fees from your account balance for pay-per-use resources at the end of each billing cycle. If your account is in arrears, we will notify you by email, SMS, or internal message.

Impact of arrears

Your account may fall into arrears after pay-per-use fees for SA are deducted from the account balance. However, your pay-per-use resources will not be stopped immediately. There will be a grace period. You need to pay the pay-per-use resource fees incurred during the grace period. To view the fees, go to the Billing Center > Overview page. The system will charge the fees once you top up your account.

If you do not pay the arrears within the grace period, the resource enters the retention period and its status turns to Frozen. You cannot perform any operations on pay-per-use resources in the retention period.

If you do not pay off the arrears within the retention period, your SA resources will be released, and data will be lost.